Qualified Hard Drives

Recommended Hard Drives

We have found that Solid State Drives (SSD) are the most reliable type of hard drive for multitrack recording and playback for all TouchMix models. In addition, they are rugged, weigh next to nothing and can be powered from the TouchMix USB port. Here are examples of solid state drives that work well with TouchMix:

Resources

Thumb Drives

Any thumb-drive with adequate capacity that can be formatted FAT32 should work for storage of TouchMix scenes, presets and firmware updates. Some thumb-drives may perform adequately for stereo or low channel-count recording but QSC does not recommend USB thumb-drives for recording.

Symptoms of an Under-Performing Drive

The initial few milliseconds of a wave may be corrupted.

Brief bits of audio may drop out of various tracks at random times resulting in loss of synchronization between tracks. This can also occur as a drive approaches its maximum capacity.

The drive may perform adequately when attempting to record a small number of tracks but exhibits some or all of the above symptoms when more tracks are armed.

Preparing a Drive for Use

The drive must be formatted as FAT32.

Note: If you are planning a critical recording session, we strongly recommend that you begin with a freshly formatted drive.

Be sure that there is sufficient space on the drive for your recording. To calculate the space required for your recording:

For 48 kHz – Space required (in MB) = 11.52 x minutes x tracks

For 44.1 kHz – Space required (in MB) = 10.58 x minutes x tracks

It is good practice to have more disk space available than you need. If the drive is nearly full, TouchMix has to look for nooks and crannies of available space. This will result in fragmented wave files and potential loss of audio data and synchronization across tracks.

At approximately 3 hours of non-stop recording, the maximum file size supported by FAT32 is exceeded. To avoid problems, stop and then resume recording. It is not necessary to create a new session. TouchMix will display a pop-up that warns you when this limit is approaching. If you do exceed the FAT32 limit, track synchronization may be lost.

How do I format my LaCie 500GB qualified hard drive for use with my TouchMix mixer?

While this drive is included on our qualified drives list for use with the TouchMix series, it requires a unique process for properly formatting it to FAT32.

This particular drive comes with a format utility that is required to run when the drive is first connected to a computer system. This utility sets up and initializes the drive for use. The setup utility has an option to set the format as FAT32, However, this creates a partition on your drive and only allocates a small amount of space to the FAT32 portion. This requires the drive to be formatted a second time with a third party utility after running the initial setup utility. There are many free utilities available and you will find them with a simple web search.